Archive: October 2014

I was a first-year undergraduate when I discovered I was going blind, studying English Literature – possibly the least sympathetic medium through which to learn what life without sight would be like.

From the source texts onwards blindness is seen as pitiable. In Greek tragedy blinding is a favourite form of divine retribution for unpardonable sins such as Oedipus’ incest; a tradition continued by Shakespeare when adulterous Gloucester has his eyes put out in King Lear.

Oedipus is told ‘thou art better off dead than living blind’ but it was visually impaired Milton who really stuck the boot in with newly blind Samson Agonistes bemoaning that he is ‘inferior to the vilest now…scarce half I seem to live…a moving grave’.

The blind are equally tortured in comedy. Gloucester can be fooled into believing anything once blinded providing comic relief in Lear. And the brazen young wife of an old blind baker in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale not only succeeds in cuckolding him during their long walks together but when he wakes to find his sight miraculously restored and his wife at it, she also persuades him it was all part of her cure for him.

The Romantic poets took blindness to a whole different level. For Blake and Wordsworth it was an obstacle to enlightenment. For Keats and Coleridge it was an allegory for their struggle to see the world as it is and for Byron and Shelley it represented the soullessness of the Age of Reason. All saw it as an impediment to self-awareness.

And people who are not self-aware can have no concept of how foolish or corrupted they are. All they can hope for is relief in the form of charity or death. Fortunately few are as irredeemable as Treasure Island’s Blind Pugh.

Occasionally a benevolent fate (perhaps out of pity) compensates the blind with extraordinary powers. Oedipus is granted wisdom, Max Carrados and a slew of other detectives, the ability to solve crimes that baffle the ordinary mind.

But their very extraordinary abilities still preclude them from leading ordinary lives. Blind characters in literature are never married and seldom happy (unless in their own ignorance).

The more resigned among us may shrug and say ‘twas ever thus, it’s only make-believe’. But the longer these stereotypes persist (and multiply with the media that carry them) the more we’ll be viewed as afflicted, lacking in self-awareness and self-reliance, inferior or only achieving by the grace of whoever. And like characters in a book, our destinies will rest in someone else’s hands.

‘

From the moment I watched a documentary of Chris Bonington and Tom Patey climb the perpendicular flanks of the Old Man of Hoy I knew that my life would not be complete until I had followed in their footholds. That was in 1983 when I was thirteen. Within months I was tackling my first crags and dreaming of standing atop Europe’s tallest sea stack with the Atlantic pounding 450 feet below. Those dreams went dark at nineteen when I learned I was going blind. I hung up my harness for twenty years and tried to ignore the twinge of desire I felt every time The Old Man appeared on TV.’ Middle aged, by now a family man, crime novelist and occasional radio personality, Red Szell’s life nonetheless felt incomplete. He was still climbing, but only indoors until he shared his old, unforgotten, dream with his buddies, Matthew and Andres, and it became obvious that an attempt had to be made. With the help of mountain guides Martin Moran and Nick Carter, and adventure cameraman Keith Partridge, supported by family and an ever growing following, Red set out to confront the Orcadian giant.

Publication date 16th April 2015 by Sandstone Press

Click here to order your copy from Amazon.co.uk

Walking home across The Heath a couple of weeks ago I came across one of my neighbours weeping on a bench. I took over rocking her howling baby in his pram while she fumbled for a tissue.

When at last the two of them had stopped crying, she told me what was the matter.

The house next door to hers is having a sub-basement dug out; the contractors eight weeks into a forty-four week project.

“I don’t think I can stand it another day, let alone the rest of the year” she sniffed. They use noise to torture people, you know? The CIA did it in Iraq and Grenada. It drives you out of your mind.”

She didn’t need to tell me. I’m still recovering from the double whammy of a six-month excavation next door that ran concurrent to the three-year construction of a swimming pool beneath the house opposite.

It’s not just the pneumatic drills, though god knows they’re bad enough, it’s the rest of the disruption: skip lorries arriving at the crack of dawn, cement mixers spewing forth their load while we were trying to eat our cornflakes, blocked drains and the endless, choking dust. Worst of all though was the dread of when the onslaught was going to start up again.

At least my kids were at school; my neighbour’s baby still needs two naps a day.

“I’ve tried asking them if they can take their lunch at a regular time, so I can put him down while it’s quiet” she told me, “and they said ‘no problem’ but nothing’s changed. I’m worried what effects it’s having on him.”

“The worst thing is, the feeling of powerlessness,” a local friend told me later over a pint at The Duke of Hamilton. “So long as the builders operate inside the time restrictions there’s bugger all you can do.” We were sitting in the shadow of the old nurse’s home just off New End, that developers hope to turn into luxury flats with a staggering three subterranean levels!

“It’s lunacy,” he continued. “In an area notorious for it’s underground streams and unstable ground conditions. The Council’s mad to let it go on.”

He had a point. One planned excavation – for a ‘basement atelier room’ no less – in Gayton Road became a damp squib only after builders found a tributary to the River Fleet 5ft down!

“The water’s got to go somewhere,” my friend reminded me as he headed off to the bog. “It’s alright for the person who’s built a concrete box in the ground but pity the poor sod next door.”

And he should know: the lower ground floor of the Victorian building he lives in had never had a day’s problem with damp until developers performed a deep-shaft land-grab beneath the building opposite. Now it’s as moist as a toad’s armpit – go figure.

You can’t dig a hole without the ground responding. Whether it’s subsidence in Rudall Crescent or water ingress in Well Road the demand for swimming pools, home-cinemas and wealth showrooms by London’s uber-consumers has profound consequences.

So why is Camden so reluctant to stop these ‘iceberg developments’? Partly because planning is preoccupied with above ground impact; partly it’s a lack of resources, or appetite, for the fight.

In the absence of a ban, I think it’s time to take a lesson from another area where wealth is extracted from the ground – fracking. Whether or not you agree with the technology, the proposal to compensate neighbouring households for the disruption and to plough a proportion of the profits back into the community is sound.

That way my neighbour with the baby would have had the option to do what the owners of basement excavations invariably do – live elsewhere during construction, instead of being driven from her home by the drills and the dust to weep and shiver on The Heath.

“I’m seriously considering putting the house on the market” she’d confided. “At least I can safely tell prospective buyers they’ve got a good chance of getting permission to dig down”

! have to confess to being somewhat of a technophobe. My year at school, born between 1969 & 1970, was the last not to have IT as part of the curriculum. I learned to touch-type rather than word-process and when I began work as a journalist you phoned in your copy (usually from a callbox) there was no email.

The truth is I am behind the technological curve, both nervous and a little resentful. So news from last week’s annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that digital technology is set to become even more visual, what with Google Glass, curved screen TVs and wrist-top tablets, did nothing to make me, as a blind person, feel less disenfranchised. And don’t get me started on touch-screen technology…

It will come as no surprise then to hear about my extensive collection of vinyl records. It’s a passion that began early when, aged 5 I dragged my mum into Woolies determined to blow my pocket money on a copy of ‘Shang-a-lang’ by The Bay City Rollers. Over the years it’s taken in all branches of rock, dance, trance and even a bit of Dolly Parton!

My hobby became an obsession when I learned I was losing my sight. As anyone who has listened to the Top 40 knows, 8 out of 10 songs tell of heartbreak and loss. I took shelter behind a wall of sound. Found sympathy and solace in weepie ballads and hard-rock defiance.

Seeking aural compensation for my loss I plundered music’s family tree – from its deepest blues roots to its most far-out psychedelic tips. Gathering entire discographies to make up for my own sense of incompleteness.

My twenties coincided with Britpop and the Indie explosion – an era to rival the Sixties. I averaged two or three gigs a week and lost myself in the blissed-out crowds where it didn’t matter who could or couldn’t see, and bumping against people was all part of the vibe…man.

And all the time I continued buying the records, except now they were compact discs. Their sound was less rich and the sleeve notes too small for me to read but the flipside was that they were far less likely to get terminally scratched when I went to listen to them.

I missed the hiss and crackle of the needle on the record but not the lottery of whether it would drop into the groove or not. In my heart I remained a purist, and kept the vinyl to prove it. Besides there was too much to replace it all on CD.

And then MP3s came along. I fought for years against buying into their topped and tailed sound, and argued that without the tactile ritual of actually ‘putting an album on’ much of the sacrament was lost. But as my eyesight faded so did my ability to distinguish between those albums. So, slowly and reluctantly I fed the discs into my computer and onto an iPod.

There everything is backlit, always in alphabetical order, never gets scratched, misplaced, stolen by my kids or used as a plaything by the cat. I can locate and listen to my music at will again.

I needed to be realistic. My vinyl collection had languished unplayed in a cupboard for over a decade. Still it was with a heavy heart that, last weekend, I exchanged this platter of childhood memories and teenage kicks for a fistful of tenners.

The two buyers had travelled down to London from Norfolk and were keen to know whether I’d also consider selling some of my CDs. I had to apply the same rationale: the MP3 player is now my default music source. My fellow collectors decimated the 1200 discs – I had to ask my wife to conclude the deal.

How could I have surrendered my keepsakes so easily? Like the albums of photos I can no longer linger over they were nevertheless records of my past – items it had always felt important to hold onto.

But a few days on, sorrow has turned to relief. A weighty albatross that reminded me of the lost ability to do something I once took for granted has been removed. In is place is the appreciation that I live in an era when, be it a vinyl record or a Polaroid snap, I can have access to it again via digital media. It may be less vibrant than the original but it’s good to know that not even the cutting edge is perfect.

Technology, though designed predominantly for the visually unimpaired, does have its benefits. So bring on the driverless car, just make sure it’s got a dock for my iPod!